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I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, had the famous and fabled Library Alexandria founded at the beginning of the 3rd century

BC not existed, it might have been invented by one of the many stories housed within its walls. It's a building of

legendary status, a library set up to contain all the knowledge of all the world on shelf

upon shelf of Egyptian papyrus. The legacy of the library is still with us, not just

in the ideas it's stored and the ideas it's ceded, but also in the way it organized knowledge

and the tools developed for dealing with that knowledge. So this day, it influences the things we know and the way we know them.

With me to discuss the library at Alexandra, a Serafina Cuomo, reader in Roman history at Birkbeck College London,

Matthew Nichols Lecture in Classics at the University of Reading,

and Simon Goldhill Professor of Greek at Cambridge University.

Simon Goldhill, perhaps the best place to start this program is not in

Alexander itself but with the death of its founder Alexander the Great who died in

323 BC. What kind of world did they leave behind him? The world is yet unconquered, but then can you tell us why he made for Alexandra?

Alexander changed the world for all time by spreading Greek culture across all of the East. He conquered the

barbarian empire as the Greeks called it of Persia. He got as far as

Afghanistan and India and across through Egypt as well.

And what he spread throughout that world was Greek culture.

It meant Greek language and Greek institutions.

He founded cities across all of that area.

And what that meant was that for the next 800 years the

language of the elite was Greek and the language indeed of a lot of the people

became Greek. It's extraordinary to think that the language of a place like Jerusalem for 800 years was Greek. It's extraordinary to think that the language of a place like Jerusalem for

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